“Excuse me,” she said. “Not sure you heard the other officer, but you’ll have to step back on the other side of the fence, please.”
“Come on,” one of the men said. “We’re not in anyone’s way. We just want to watch the fire.”
“And you can do that, sir,” Berit said. “But from the other side of the fence.”
“We want to watch from here,” the other one said.
Jake glanced at the rest of the crowd to make sure they were all safely off the property, then headed over to back up Berit.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “That’s not possible. You and your friend will have to move.”
“Really, honey?” the second one asked. “What harm are we doing?”
Jake wanted to step in, and knew that probably any other officer would, but he also knew it wasn’t what Berit would want. So he stopped several feet behind her.
In a controlled voice, she said, “Sir, I’m not your honey, and you’re not staying. So either you walk through that opening and get on the other side of that fence, or we arrest you for trespassing. Up to you.”
The first man put a hand on his friend’s arm. “Let’s go.”
The second man held his place for a moment, scowling at Berit, but then he turned and the two of them walked away.
Jake moved up next to her. “Impressive,” he whispered. “For a woman.”
“And damn near impossible for a man,” she said.
“True,” he agreed.
Together they walked over to the gate. For the next several minutes they were peppered with questions from the growing crowd, most of which they answered with “I’m sorry, I don’t know the answer to that.”
Though there had been no indication the fire was a crime, they knew they had to treat it as such until they were notified otherwise. So, per training, they noted the faces in the crowd, looking for anyone unusually interested in what was going on. But if there was an arsonist in this crowd, Jake was having no success picking out him or her.
It took less than an hour for the firemen to get the blaze extinguished. By then, most of the structure was gone.
“Oliver. Davies,” the voice of Sergeant Niccum said over the radio.
Berit touched the mic on her shoulder. “Yes, sir?”
Jake then did the same. “I’m here, sir.”
“Be advised, we have a nine-oh-one H.”
Both Jake and Berit tensed. A dead body.
“Yes, sir,” Jake said. Then, because he couldn’t help himself, asked, “May I ask where?”
“No, you may not,” the sergeant rebuked him, then signed off.
“Smooth,” Berit said to Jake.
“Yeah, I’ve been practicing,” he replied, trying to play it down.
He knew he shouldn’t have asked the question, but he and Haywood had been first on scene. He would have thought that gave him the right to know what was going on, but apparently not.
“Don’t worry. We’ll find out soon enough,” Berit said, no doubt sensing what was going through his mind.
If only he’d been thinking that way before he’d asked the question, but sometimes he just couldn’t help himself. It was his damn curiosity. A trait he was sure would help him when he became a detective.
If, that was, it didn’t sink his career before then.
5
By the time Jake arrived home, it was nearly 3 a.m. Sleep took a little while to come, and when it did, it was fitful at best. By 8 a.m., he’d had enough and dragged himself into the shower.
The problem was he couldn’t get the fire out of his mind. By the time he’d been released from the scene, investigators had established that the body found inside the barn, while severely burned, had a bullet wound through the neck. There might have been other wounds, too, but the condition of the body made it impossible to check on site.
Was this the guy who had called 911? No one else had mentioned the possibility, but Jake had to believe others were thinking it. No matter what, the fire was obviously meant to cover up the murder.
And what about that depression he’d seen in the sand? Did that have something to do with any of this?
Jake let the water run over his head as he tried to think it through, but everything he came up with was pure speculation, each scenario wilder than the last. Somewhere between the shampoo and the body wash, he decided to return to the barn for another look. He wasn’t due in until four that afternoon so he still had most of the day ahead of him.
He threw on some jeans and a dark T-shirt, grabbed a clean uniform and his belt and gun in case he didn’t have time to come back to his apartment before his shift began, then headed out to the car. The uniform and belt he put in the trunk, but the gun he slid under the front seat. Almost as an afterthought, he returned to the trunk, retrieved his police badge, and shoved it into his pocket.
Though it was only May, the day was already a hot one. But this being Phoenix, that was not unusual. Jake never complained about the heat. He’d grown up about as far north as a person could get without being Canadian. His hometown of Warroad was right at the western base of the little hump at the top of Minnesota. Even with a population of just a few thousand, it was the biggest town for miles. In the winter, Warroad would get as cold as Phoenix got hot. The cold, Jake had no problems complaining about. He and temperatures below fifty degrees had never seen eye to eye. Arizona, on the other hand, suited him just fine.
He drove his second-hand Honda Civic out to the site of the previous night’s fire. As he neared, he could see several vehicles parked down near the remains of the structure. Detectives and ID techs, no doubt, and maybe a fire marshal or two.
There was a cop stationed at the gate, another rookie named Eli Dunbar. Jake turned onto the dirt road, then stopped and rolled down his window.
“Hey, Snowbird,” Dunbar said, using the nickname Jake had obtained at the academy. “What are you doing here?”
“Morning, Eli,” Jake said, forcing on a smile. He wasn’t a big fan of Dunbar’s. “Haywood and I were first on scene last night. I was told to swing by after I got up.” Not exactly true, but close. He was told to check in with the detectives heading up the investigation before he started his shift. It was never said where, but the implication had been at Jake’s substation — where the detectives would be working out of for the next couple of days — not the crime scene.
“That was you, huh? You the ones who found the body, too?”
Jake shook his head. “No, we didn’t even know it was there. They found it after they put the fire out.”
Dunbar looked back at the barn for a second. “If you ask me, I’ll bet you it has something to do with drugs. A deal gone bad, a turf war or something like that. You just wait and see. He’ll be Mexican for sure.”
Jake wasn’t about to start trading theories with him, so he just said, “You might be right.”
“You better believe I am.”
Jake gave him a nod. “I’d better run,” he said, slipping the car back into gear.
Dunbar pointed down the road. “Park near the other cars. And careful where you step. It’s still a crime scene.”
“Thanks,” Jake told him, then started driving away. What he really wanted to say was, “No kidding, asshole. I know it’s a crime scene,” but you couldn’t win with a guy like Dunbar. No matter what you said, or how right you were, they’d think you were the asshole.
Jake parked next to a van he knew belonged to one of the identity techs, then got out. There were nearly a dozen people at the barn, split almost evenly between those on the perimeter and those inside the wreckage.
He knew the body had been taken to the morgue the night before, so the attention now would be on processing the scene for any evidence left behind. A couple of the people on the outside seemed to be examining a tire print, while another was shooting photographs of it.